Cruising
Dir. William Friedkin
Following the box office smashes that were The French Connection and The Exorcist, Hollywood golden boy Billy Friedkin directed a series of ambitious films that would fail to generate the dollars and praise of his earlier successes. Perhaps one of the oddest of these later works is Cruising (1980), a police thriller starring Al Pacino as an undercover cop in New York City’s 1970’s gay club world, out to catch a serial killer hidden amongst its ranks. As the investigation progresses and Pacino fully integrates the freewheeling sex and drug culture that marked the pre-AIDS era, the lines between work and play begin to blur, as his own sexual identity of “tough straight cop” is thrown into disarray.
Probably one of the most non-PC films in recent history, Cruising depicts gay culture as a sort of mass S&M debauchery, with the killer punishing his victims for their raw erotic hedonism. Yet despite the Hollywood gloss and clear right-ish leanings, Friedkin managed to capture a certain documentary realism in the subculture of underground clubs and after hour dives that once made up NY’s meatpacking district—a district where French bistros and design stores have gone on to replace the all night disco.
Starts March 5. Action Cinémas, www.actioncinemas.com
Johnnie To Retrospective
Like John Woo, Tsui Hark, Jackie Chan and Ringo Lam, producer/director Johnnie To is the latest of Hong Kong’s legendary action filmmakers to receive both public and critical acclaim in the West. As a young apprentice at the Television Broadcasting Corporation (TVB), To learned the ropes of a local film industry built on highly stylized genre pictures and went on to make several dozen cop thrillers, martial arts epics, gangster dramas and rom coms (romantic comedies). When in 1996 he founded Milkyway Image, his very own production studio, To began shooting a series of frenetically paced, ironically deconstructed suspense pics, including the groundbreaking Running Out of Time (1999) and The Mission (1999), that propelled him to the forefront of the international festival circuit.
The upcoming retrospective at the Cinémathèque will offer viewers a chance to catch several of To’s earlier, unreleased works, as well as more recent favorites. Among them are the diptych Election 1 (2005) and Election 2 (2006), in which Hong Kong’s move towards independence is mimicked in a triad boss’ attempt to both reform and dominate the world of organized crime, as well as the media satire Breaking News (2004), whose opening shootout sequence is one of recent cinema’s most breathtaking, with the camera capturing the action in one absurdly long, sumptuous take.
Until April 14. Cinémathèque française, 51, rue de Bercy, Paris 12. M° Bercy.
01 71 19 33 33. www.cinematheque.fr
